Communists

This post by John Quiggin makes some similar points to ones that I made earlier about Communist sympathizers. It also reminds me of some things I thought while hearing a panel at the Oppenheimer centenary at Berkeley, but I don't remember if I wrote them down here. At any rate, the point is that many supposed intellectual Stalinists were fans of some sort of Communist doctrine and thought that the Soviet Union was supporting this idealistic doctrine, though in hindsight we can see quite clearly that already by the early '30s they really weren't.

The Top Three Things You Don't Want To Hear At Your Conference Talk

3. [An attendee, 5 minutes beforehand]: Hey guys, there's a talk on how they schedule football games for the NFL in the other session!

2. [10 minutes into the talk]: Ummm.... could you define your problem?

1. [After the talk]: Did you ever see the paper that Hugh McAllister and I did in 1997, or did that paper get completely lost to history? We did basically everything you did in this paper, but our paper was about how to do it better.

(This is a list of real things I saw and heard about at AAAI, but don't worry, gentle readers: only 3 and a version of 1 happened at my talk.)

Polls

I went to check the recent polls after seeing last night on CNN that they said their latest poll put Kerry up at least 6 points extra as a convention bounce, but I haven't been able to find that poll yet. Checking The Polling Report though, I see that Kerry has been ahead in just about every poll for the past two months, and the latest Zogby polls have him up substantially in the East and West, and even ahead in the South, but somehow behind in the Midwest. I can understand this only if the Midwest stretches all the way to Colorado and includes Oklahoma - I'd think the Illinois and Michigan margins for Kerry would overshadow the Bush margins in Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas.

Anyway, who knows what any of this means. All I know is that people tend to break for the challenger at the end, so an incumbent who's below 50% in the polls has a very slim chance of winning.

Massive Spam Attack

We've just been hit by 2500 pieces of comment spam in two days.

Whoa.

Crazy William Safire

In today's op-ed column he criticizes Kerry for taking middle grounds on various issues. On most of these issues though, Kerry seems to agree with the majority of the American people, while the extreme positions on either side that Safire calls more logical have much smaller bases of support. I don't think Safire will win many people over by calling their positions illogical.

Convention Speeches

Over the past two days, I've watched the convention speeches of Bill Clinton, Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Ron Reagan, and Teresa Heinz Kerry. Clinton was his usual silver-tongued self, with some great self-deprecating lines about how he had received so much money for the Bush tax cuts that he wants Kerry to take back for the people, and how he (like Bush) had avoided the Vietnam War, while Kerry volunteered to serve.

Howard Dean seemed understandably miffed that he only got this speech instead of the big acceptance one on Thursday, but reiterated the need to fight for Kerry and Edwards. His greatest line was about how "We need to be proud to be Democrats in Mississippi! We need to be proud to be Democrats in Utah!" At this point, I thought he was going to reprise his famous "I Have a Scream" speech and list a whole bunch of states, ending with "yeeah!" But he just stopped with "And we need to be proud to be Democrats in Texas!", which got him huge cheers.

Barack Obama was amazing. This guy will be the first black president of the United States, assuming Colin Powell doesn't run in 2008. He's just a state senator in Illinois right now, and is basically already guaranteed to win his US Senate seat in the fall (his opponent being having the unfortunate last name for Republicans in Illinois of "Ryan" and having been caught in a sex scandal), but after seeing his speech, I can see why they made him the keynote speaker for the evening. The first half of the speech was a bit lackluster, but when he started hammering on about how there is only one United States of America, not blue states and red states, not white black Latino and Asian, and so on, he really mobilized the crowd. He wasn't quite as polished as Clinton, but Clinton had many years as Governor and then President, and has nothing really at stake any more, so he's had plenty of chances to polish his speaking skills. Obama will as well, I'm sure.

Ron Reagan was a bit less inspiring, staying totally away from politics and therefore having few applause lines. He spent the entire time speaking about stem cells, and did manage to get a few applause lines out, though they were a bit odd, being scientific claims, rather than partisan ones. Who would have thought two months ago that the only Reagan appearance at a convention would have been at the Democratic one?

Teresa Heinz Kerry was really quite good. She wasn't an excellent speaker by any means, but good enough. She started by showing off her five languages, addressing herself "to all Americans, a tout les franco-americains, a tutti l'italiani" and a couple things in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as "to all continental Africans, and to all immigrants". Her main point was that she won't be shut up, which might seem a bit ominous to the Kerry campaign. But there are many ways she won't be shut up, whether by her husband's campaign, by being called "opinionated" rather than "intelligent and well-informed", by living in a dictatorship like she did in Mozambique, by not speaking out against oppression as she did in South Africa, or by having a party that doesn't tolerate dissension, like some political parties in power that weren't named. It was really qutie a nice set of over-arching connections, even though they weren't explicitly tied together. It took her a while to mention the environment, but she did at several points, since it's of course her big issue. She also seems like much more of a fan of science than almost any politician. One of her biggest applause lines was about the Hubble telescope! She also said something about how she'll "speak truth to power", which is something that academics say all the time, but politicians never do. She'll be a good first lady, I think.

One thing I found interesting was how many dead Republicans they were channeling, between Obama's mention of being from the Land of Lincoln, Ron Reagan mentioning his father, and Teresa Heinz Kerry constantly referring to her first husband and then quoting Lincoln. I think Lincoln and Reagan were actually the only two former presidents mentioned by name. I found out this morning though that none of it was covered on network TV, just on cable and the internet. Too bad.

AAAI Conference

I'm off to the American Association of Artificial Intelligence conference for the rest of the week. The conference itself is in San Jose, which means I'm sleeping at home and can't get reimbursed for any expenses (driving, parking, eating out). I will, nevertheless, have an arduous schedule of driving, parking, and eating out for the rest of the week. Thus, I will likely not be blogging unless something really interesting happens at the Democratic convention.